The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

M also applied to US universities but merely get onto the waitlist. She had only applied to top "ivy league and equivalent" schools which are notoriously hard to get into (the recent admission shenanigans aside). In their response, the US schools however demonstrate a masterclass in managing disappointments!

One school wrote back,
"I hope you understand that the decision reflects the extraordinary range of talents represented in our applicant pool and not a judgment about your own abilities and potential. Of the nearly thirty seven thousand individuals who applied this year, most are fully capable of doing outstanding work and making a contribution to a campus community. It is painful to us that we must turn away so many superlatively talented students. You may be tempted to ask what was lacking in your application. In truth, it is usually difficult to point to obvious weaknesses when so many applicants have demonstrated real achievements and potential for the future. Our decisions say far more about the small number of spaces available and the difficult choices we make than they do about a candidate's personal and academic promise".
What linguistic prowess!

Well, it is unfortunate she was not chosen but her personal statement essay already tell us she will rise well from this.

Sounds of stiff applause filled the arena. Competitors filed in, discreetly sizing each other up. The tension was palpable, alongside the unmistakable smell of treats.

I was 12 and at my maiden canine obedience competition with my 6-month-old poodle, Caramel. Awaiting our turn, I felt Caramel’s nose against my ankle. Neither of us were good with anxiety: at the vet, Caramel had thrown up in hopes of escaping vaccination.

“Next, please.” Heart racing, I signalled her to begin the routine. To my relief, the first segment progressed well. Caramel surprised me (and the judges, I hoped) with impeccable moves.

However, part two was less certain. Despite weeks of practice, we had not mastered the “sit-and-stay”, because six-month-old Caramel just could not keep still. After instructing her, I headed for the exit, but the sound of muffled laughter stopped me. I whipped around, only to find her crouched in the midst of a Number Two. Speechless, I watched horrified as Caramel finished her business and fled the room, disqualifying us. All hopes of winning were soiled, literally.

Running after Caramel, I felt like an utter loser. My grandparents would be aghast! Second-generation immigrants to Malaysia, failing was not an option in their struggles against discrimination. They had taught me that only winners are rewarded. Imagining their frowns at this public disgrace, I was close to tears. I had never not aced before.

Upon finding Caramel, my mortification eased. Wiggling her bottom joyfully, she was oblivious to her blunder. I couldn’t help laughing. Indeed, it was absurd to be ashamed of failing instead of laughing it off and moving on! So, we re-entered the arena, my head (and her tail) held high to friendly applause.

I’ve been in many competitions since, albeit without Caramel who still poops at awkward times. Playing softball competitively for 6 years and representing my country on several occasions, I know the heartache of strikeouts and elation of homeruns. Palms sweating before each match, I was anxious throughout every season but I grew better at conquering the fear of losing. Familiar with the pain of failure on the field, I rallied my teammates when they underperformed. Earliest at trainings and last to leave, our tireless practise saw us rise from underdogs to national champions.

It was one thing to occasionally lose in sports, but it was more daunting to fail in areas I have always excelled in. Although well-meaning peers warned against overloading my schedule and staining my near-perfect grades, I accepted a prestigious offer to read Geopolitics at the National University of Singapore. A geography student surrounded by history majors, I struggled without the pre-requisite foundations (Robert McNamara seemed like just another bespectacled Caucasian.) Knowing less than others was tough, but I wanted to learn – not to become the best, but to satisfy my curiosity. I devoured jargoned readings and researched issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict. Fortunately Singapore is far-removed from violent conflict, but Benedict Anderson’s observation of nationalism as Imagined Communities holds true. Having completed the final assessments, I don’t know what my grade is, but it’s all good. At least, I now recognise defence secretaries and understand how conflicts shape policies, or how policies worsen conflict in the thick of the fog of war.

By the time I was elected vice-chair of the school’s Peer Support Board, I was unafraid to try new things and risk failure, but this also made me overzealous. In organizing Orientation programmes, my proactive ways prevented assigned leaders from working things out themselves. Thereafter, I consciously sought others’ opinions, learning to empower rather than command.

Born determined and competitive, I cannot help striving for the best. Now though, I’ve learnt to seize instead of size opportunities. Inspired by Caramel, I’ve learnt that failing is but a chance to improve. Like her, I’ll aim for Number 1, but won’t let life’s Number 2s get me down!

 PS: about a month ago, Caramel's brother, Summer passed after living a long 15 dog years. He is happy in doggy heaven.

Flying the coop

M passed her driving test two days ago. This means she can now move around even more freely around the city. It's yet another step towards adult freedom she is taking.

Come October though, she will be taking more than a step: more like a leap or a flight! After working really hard throughout her schooling years, she has done well and got admitted into a good university over in the UK.

Photo credit: Carl Court, Getty Images

The university admission process nowadays include submitting a personal statement. Here's the one she wrote that got her into her university.

My neighbours are unpleasant. They lack etiquette, quarrel vociferously, raid our kitchen and mate indiscriminately in public. While nettled by their temerity and thievery, I feel for them. These long-tailed macaque monkeys were left hungry and homeless as nearby forests were cleared for urban development. Were we the first intruders? Alarmed, my human neighbours and I petitioned to conserve the forest.

I care about how humans change nature, and how nature fights back. Take climate change: while Albert Tucker’s Prisoners’ Dilemma reinforces the imperative for cooperation, there is equal urgency for individual effort. Thus inspired, I produced a video for the National Climate Change Competition to raise awareness about climate change in Singapore. I explored Dr. Renee Lertzman’s Environmental Melancholia, where though many recognise the climate crisis, its sheer magnitude is paralysing. I addressed this aspect of human nature with a practical vision to reduce Singapore’s carbon footprint, through roads that can harness cars’ kinetic energy to power streetlights. My video was placed second nation-wide, but my bigger takeaway was the importance of behavioral science in mitigating climate change. Driven by humans, eventually affecting humans, solutions must be human-centred.

All nature is founded on biochemistry. It awed me that life could be traced back to the simple elements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. Intrigued by enantiomerism and its applications in human health, I searched for more but sadly found many gaps: Thalidomide, a drug used to ease morning sickness, caused birth deformities and even deaths due to side effects of its enantiomer. Such unknowns in the medical field underscore the mysteries about humans that still escape us and my curiosity for answers led to my topping Biology in Secondary 4.

Knowing my own studies are incomplete, I opted to read Geopolitics in the National University of Singapore. I learnt a new dimension of human science: the relationship between space and power. Man’s reliance on the environment shapes our policies. Ironically, we cheer scientific breakthroughs for preservation of life, but ignore the millions displaced in conflict. Our Rohingya neighbours suffer atrocities not too long after genocide in Germany. Thus I am grateful that in multi-racial Singapore, urban planning is guided by spatial justice. Amy Chua wrote in ‘Political Tribes’ that humans are wired with tribal instincts & identities. For cohesion of increasingly plural societies, we need both geopolitical and psychological understandings of humans to create liveable spaces that facilitate optimal human relationships. In short, geography makes us human.

 I took this further when participating in the National Geography Challenge. In my fieldwork research on therapeutic landscapes as conceived by Wilbert Gesler, I found hospital green spaces do reduce levels of cancer biomarkers. Through interacting with patients, I also found their need for emotional wellness. I proposed multi-functional infrastructure with natural elements for physiological recovery, such as lining train tracks with grass and vertical farms on apartment blocks. My research contributed to my individual Gold and team Bronze award in the competition, and my selection for the Geography Talent Development Programme.

Keen to see good plans in action, I secured an internship with National Parks Board. I made use of Geographical Information Systems to map out future zones of development for the Botanic Gardens. The exercise helped me appreciate the judicious planning needed to sustain growth in space constrained Singapore. If we can house 7 million on 50 km2, in theory the world’s population could thrive in just 1000 such islands.

Macaque monkeys are not unique to Singapore, nor are the factors contributing to their displacement. I am excited by the prospect of learning alongside leading minds, for a collective impact through individual effort when we return to the different parts of our world.

I don't think I could have written anything half as accomplished had it been my application. Onwards and upwards, my daughter.....

Why girls beat boys in school and lose to them in the office

From elementary school through college, girls are more disciplined about their schoolwork than boys; they study harder and get better grades. Girls consistently outperform boys academically. And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies.

What if those same habits that propel girls to the top of their class — their hyper-conscientiousness about schoolwork — also hold them back in the work force?

When investigating what deters professional advancement for women, the journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman found that a shortage of competence is less likely to be an obstacle than a shortage of confidence. When it comes to work-related confidence, they found men are far ahead. “Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,” they wrote. “Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect.”

As a psychologist who works with teenagers, I hear this concern often from the parents of many of my patients. They routinely remark that their sons do just enough to keep the adults off their backs, while their daughters relentlessly grind, determined to leave no room for error. The girls don’t stop until they’ve polished each assignment to a high shine and rewritten their notes with color-coded precision.

We need to ask: What if school is a confidence factory for our sons, but only a competence factory for our daughters?

M sent this to me after I wrote about our relationship in this very blog! It's our way to communicating (of sorts!). She knows this is exactly the sort of topic I get passionate on. Am glad she picked it up. It's a well observed piece by Lisa Dalmour for the New York Times.

This possibility hit me when I was caring for an eighth grader in my practice. She got terrific grades but was feeling overwhelmed by school. Her brother, a ninth grader, had similarly excellent grades, but when I asked if he worked as hard as she did, she scoffed. If she worked on an assignment for an hour and got an A, she felt “safe” only if she spent a full hour on other assignments like it. Her brother, in contrast, flew through his work. When he brought home an A, she said, he felt “like a stud.” If his grades slipped a bit, he would take his effort up just a notch. But she never felt “safe” enough to ever put in less than maximum effort.

That experience — of succeeding in school while exerting minimal or moderate effort — is a potentially crucial one. It may help our sons develop confidence, as they see how much they can accomplish simply by counting on their wits. For them, school serves as a test track, where they build their belief in their abilities and grow increasingly at ease relying on them. Our daughters, on the other hand, may miss the chance to gain confidence in their abilities if they always count on intellectual elbow grease alone.

So how do we get hyper-conscientious girls (and boys, as there certainly are some with the same style) to build both confidence and competence at school?

This question is increasingly relevant as the Lean In movement gathers pace and women (who hold up half the sky) are being put into positions in all spheres of life.

First, parents and teachers can stop praising inefficient overwork, even if it results in good grades. Gendered approaches to learning set in early, so it’s never too soon to start working against them. Recently, as I read “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” to my 8-year-old daughter, I stopped at a passage in which Hermione — the fictional poster child for academic fastidiousness — turned in an essay that was “two rolls of parchment more than Professor Binns asked for.” Hermione, I pointed out, doesn’t make great use of her time. She’s a capable student and could probably do just as well without working so hard. “Right,” my daughter said. “Of course she could!”

We can also encourage girls toward a different approach to school — one that’s more focused on economy of effort, rather than how many hours they put in. Whenever one of the academically impressive and persistently anxious girls in my practice tells me about staying up until 2 in the morning studying, I see an opening. That’s the moment to push them to become tactical, to figure out how to continue learning and getting the same grades while doing a little bit less. I urge my patients — and my own teenage daughter — to begin study sessions by taking sample tests, to see how much they know before figuring out how much more they need to do to attain mastery over a concept or task. Many girls build up an incredible capacity for work, but they need these moments to discover and take pride in how much they already understand.

Teachers, too, can challenge girls’ over-the-top tendencies. When a girl with a high-A average turns in extra credit work, her instructor might ask if she is truly taken with the subject or if she is looking to store up “insurance points,” as some girls call them. If it’s the former, more power to her. If it’s the latter, the teacher might encourage the student to trust that what she knows and the work she is already doing will almost certainly deliver the grade she wants. Educators can also point out to this student that she may not need insurance; she probably has a much better grasp of the material than she gives herself credit for.

Finally, we can affirm for girls that it is normal and healthy to feel some anxiety about school. Too often, girls are anxious even about being anxious, so they turn to excessive studying for comfort. We can remind them that being a little bit nervous about schoolwork just means that they care about it, which of course they should.

Even if neither you nor your daughter cares about becoming a chief executive, you may worry that she will eventually be crushed by the weight of her own academic habits. While a degree of stress promotes growth, working at top speed in every class at all times is unhealthy and unsustainable for even the most dedicated high school students. A colleague of mine likes to remind teenagers that in classes where any score above 90 counts as an A, the difference between a 91 and a 99 is a life.

To be sure, the confidence gap is hardly the only thing keeping women out of top jobs. Women also face gender bias, sexual harassment and powerful structural barriers in the workplace. But confidence at school is one unequal advantage that we can address right now. Instead of standing by as our daughters make 50 flashcards when they were assigned 20, we can step in and ask them why. Many professional men brim with confidence because they have spent years getting to know their abilities. Women should arrive in the work world having done the same.

It's been observed that this movement was the result that there were not a single First Son in the White House for 24 years prior to this and hence for a generation, the 'leader in the free world' peg the hopes of a better future on a daughter. I have a son and a daughter and I wish both brighter futures too.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

I hear you even when you are silent

This is not an original title. I read it off a friend's post on facebook. But it spoke to me. For this is exactly how i feel with my loved ones.

M is about to step across the threshold into independent living. I want to be there for her but the pattern of interaction has been set a while ago. Her go-to person is her mom. Even in dinner conversations, her answers to my questions would be directed more towards her mom.

Maybe she feels i haven't been around enough, hence i don't know her enough and therefore her answers would be more appreciated by her mom who would have the full context.

Our conversations have become less frequent nowadays and when we do chat, it is often on things of import. So rather than a chat, it becomes counselling or worse instructing.

That's not the relationship i want. Just yesterday, as a result of some photo transfer request, we got into a misunderstanding. But in that difficult moment, i felt we reached a breakthrough. She learned how i felt about externalising problems. I have however not yet achieve the breakthrough myself, about how i have not understood her better.

I will do better.

I understand all this and i accept it. I only wish to tell her, and all my loved ones that i hear you even when you are silent.

A good tournament capped by a good final

At the start of the FIFA 2018 World Cup, I posted on Facebook that for a month various peoples of at least 32 nations in the world will be united for their country. What ensued in the tournament truly made a case for national unity. Just about every player in every team played their heart out in their country's jersey. How else would you have Russia (the lowest ranked team) in the quarter finals? That South Korea beat defending champs Germany and knocked them out in the first round. 

 

A tournament like this deserve a final to match. And we got it: as the Telegraph succinctly puts it,  "truly, madly, deeply". We will miss this World Cup like no other. The day after Bastille Day France are champions and deservedly so. But only after the most remarkable, crazy and controversial encounter against a courageous Croatia in which there was a VAR storm, and an actual storm in the skies above Moscow, a first-ever own goal in a World Cup Final, a cool strike from a new global superstar, an horrific goalkeeping blunder by the man who lifted the trophy - and a Pussy Riot pitch invasion.

 

To secure its status as the best ever World Cup the tournament needed a memorable final. It got it. What a finale it was to this 31-day festival of football, as Gareth Southgate called it, and it was the highest-scoring final since England beat West Germany 4-2 in 1966. Well, they sang football’s coming home. At least the score was the same and while England and their fans will never stop dreaming of what might have been - just 22 minutes from the final, if anyone needed reminding - France have the 18-carat gold, 14-inch, 11lb trophy for the second time ever and the second time in 20 years.

 

What struck me most was how equal the game has become globally. Yes, all the semi-finalists were Europeans but many players including the winning French team had more than half their players who are immigrants or sons of immigrants. I spoke to a French colleague today and wish her and her country all the best in national integration and healing. Well, one can dream!

 

It also occurred to me that the way to win it has evolved. Possession and passing especially that practiced by Spain won it for them. France was happy to let the opponent keep possession and attempt shots from distance. They defended stoutly and were clinical when they had to strike. Efficient, fast and most of all productive. They make it look easy.

 

Third, it is such a mental game. Many of the upsets were caused not by a lack of skill but because players gave up playing. From the antics of Neymar to the defeatist body language of Messi, teams lost it in their minds before they lost it on the pitch. The most egregious example is Kieran Trippier. He was so devastated by Croatia's late strike, he couldn't play on in the semi-finals when his country was trailing and left them with 10 men with 10 minutes to play. Talk about losing it!

 

Croatia deserves more. They were the tournament's heart. But as M put it, and i parphrase her, the head won

Luka Modric (& Zvonimir Boban) by Boris Starling

The old man took his cattle up the hill that morning in December 1991, because that’s what he did every day, rain or shine, winter or summer. He took his cattle up the hill that morning, and he never came back. A handful of men in police uniforms arrested him. Whether or not they were legally police officers was moot, and it was also irrelevant: round these parts, power came from the barrel of a gun, not from a piece of paper.

 

The man’s crime was the same crime it always is in places riven by sectarianism: not being one of them. Being the other. Being the enemy. His crime was nothing he’d done: it was who he was. He was Croatian, they were Serbian. That was all there was to it. The men took him and a few others to the nearby village of Jesenice, and there they were executed. The old man left behind a family whom he loved and who loved him: none more so than his six-year-old grandson with whom he shared a name and from whom he had been practically inseparable, the old man doting on the boy, the boy hero-worshipping his grandfather.

 

The name they shared was Luka Modric, and this Sunday that small boy, now 32, will lead his country out in the World Cup Final.

 

Football uses the language of war: strikes, shots, volleys, attacks, defence, bombardment. Modric, like all his countrymen, knows the difference between the real thing and the game: knows too that in Croatia one is always bound up with the other, because between them they are the history of that small, proud nation writ large.

 

After his grandfather was murdered, Luka’s family’s house was burned down, and they had to live in a hotel for years: not an expensive comfortable one, but a basic, crumbling one in their hometown of Zadar. When the mortars fell, as they often did, young Luka would sit inside and wait them out: but when the all clear was given, he’d be off playing football in the hotel car park, sometimes with other kids, sometimes on his own. Anything to escape the grim, numbing reality of living in a perpetual state of conflict.

 

He was a small kid: too small, as it turned out, to be taken on by the local bigwigs Hadjuk Split. He ended up playing aged 18 in the Bosnian-Hercegovinan league for Zrinjski Mostar, which was where both team-mates and opponents discovered two things about this kid: that he had all the skills you could want, and that he could look after himself too.

 

Fast forward 15 years, through a journey that has taken him from Dinamo Zagreb via Tottenham Hotspur to Real Madrid. Even though he still looks like, in the unimprovable words of the Guardian’s Barney Ronay, ‘a little boy dressed as a witch’, he is now one of the best players in the world: a midfielder of fabulous talents, one of the very few who can bend time and space to his will.

And of all those talents, perhaps the greatest is this: that he makes others play better. When the simple pass is the best option, that’s what he plays. When he needs to hold the ball for a few moments so his team-mates can get into better positions, that’s what he does. When he has to cover back after someone else’s mistake, that’s what he does.

 

He’s not one of those superstars whose megawattage draws the eye and the play too, whose own presence inhibits the other ten men wearing the same shirt as him. He’s the ultimate leader precisely because he doesn’t make it all about himself. You won’t find him rolling around as though he’s just stepped on a landmine, or ripping his shirt off when he scores, or standing there looking haunted when things aren’t going his way. He leaves that kind of stuff to Neymar, to Ronaldo, to Messi. They’re all home already. He’s still there, and so are his team. And his team love him. When he missed a penalty late in the match against Denmark, his team-mate Ivan Rakitic gathered the others round. 'Listen,' he said. 'Lukita's got us out of more messes than we can count. It's our turn to repay him.' The Croatians put the miss behind them and won the subsequent shoot-out, with Rakitic slotting the winning kick.

 

But if you want to know what Modric is made of, here it is: only a few minutes after missing that penalty, he'd taken another one in the shoot-out, with the Danish keeper Kaspar Schmiechel in his face trying to put him off. Did he score second time round? Of course he did.

 

It’s hard to understand – no, it’s easy to understand, but hard to properly FEEL – what this Croatian side mean to their country. The most famous image in English football history is that of Bobby Moore lifting the World Cup. The most famous image in Croatian football history, by contrast, is that of Zvonimir Boban taking a flying kick at a riot policeman.

 

It was during a match between Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade in 1990, not long after Croatia had effectively voted for secession from Yugoslavia by electing a majority of pro-independence parties to their parliament. Boban saw the policeman mistreating Dinamo supporters during a riot and launched himself head high at the man. ‘Here I was,’ Boban said later, ‘a public face prepared to risk his life, career, and everything that fame could have brought, all because of one ideal, one cause; the Croatian cause.’ Boban was sacked from the Yugoslavia team who went to the World Cup that year. He didn’t care. In his own mind he was Croatian, not Yugoslavian, and eight years later he captained Croatia to third place in their very first World Cup. He was leader of a generation of fabulous players - Slaven Bilic, Robert Prosinecki, Davor Suker - who to this day are revered in their country.

 

 

 

In reaching the final, Modric’s men have already gone one better than their predecessors. It’s fitting that they’re playing France: both sides have played three group matches and three knockouts, with Croatia the stars of the group stage and France the best team in the knockouts. The smart money has to be on France. They are a better team overall, and they have won all their knockout matches in normal time where Croatia have been taken to three consecutive extra times: an additional 90 minutes of football, the equivalent of an entire match more.

 

My head says a French victory, perhaps even an easy one. But my heart says a Croatian win, for the fairytale of the underdogs, for a proud people forged in war, and most of all for their remarkable captain and the old man after whom he was named.

 

 

 

As it turned out, the French won. Modric didn't play all that well in that final match but still well enough to be the best player of the tournament (winning the golden ball trophy) and received a warm hug from his president and many others.

World Cup 2018: The Tragicomic Opera of Croatia’s Mario Mandzukic bySam Knight

The month long football fever that afflicts Planet Earth once every 4 years is nearly over. This 2018 edition is said to be one of the best, from number of goals scored to the nice surprise of upsets (South Korea vs Germany, Croatia vs Argentina, Belgium vs Brazil are three clear victories that jump to mind). Along with upsets, it is not just favourite teams (Ronaldo's first match impact notwithstanding) but also big players who didn't perform. One big name (Neymar) had more minutes (14) of feigned injuries than moments of brilliance. It is this that leaves a bad taste in the mouth for some sports spectators and also this that makes football the highest in melodrama. The New Yorker article that follows caught my eye.

As surely as the leaves come off the trees in fall, toward the end of any football match that goes to extra time, a player will crumple to the turf with cramp. It normally happens off camera, away from the ball—suddenly he’s sitting there, rooted and unmoveable. It’s cramp! He shrugs, like it’s never happened before, and there’s nothing he can do. Someone runs over to help him up. No dice. Cramp, I’m afraid! And he stays where he is. Everyone knows that cramp is painful as hell, but no one knows whether extra-time cramp is real. The players who seize up are usually on the side that is winning, or at least running the clock down. In the olden days, you used to see players from opposing teams stretching each other out, like gym buddies, and then rising to stagger on, socks rolled down. But that’s gone. Now it’s a shake of the head. Staying down. Cramp, you see.

 

In the second half of extra time in Croatia’s tough, resourceful World Cup semifinal victory over England, the player going down with cramp was Mario Mandžukić, the thirty-two-year-old forward, who plays his club football for Juventus. Mandžukić, like the rest of Croatia’s team, had been crassly overlooked—by the British media, anyway—in the buildup to the match. He has won more club trophies than all the members of the England team combined. But don’t let that get you down. The whole deal with England in this World Cup was that the nation wasn’t getting carried away. The team was young and played without pressure; Gareth Southgate was our normcore manager. But, after the team beat Sweden in a surprisingly competent manner last Saturday, all that went out the window. People started singing spontaneously on trains. Fans rampaged through an ikea. Car horns honked all night. The old blood-thickening hope, the old “Football’s Coming Home” entitlement, came swamping back, and everyone started making plans for the final. Croatia, who?

Further Reading

More coverage of the 2018 World Cup from The New Yorker.

Mandžukić, in fairness, is the kind of forward who is easy to miss. The game naturally celebrates players who like the ball at their feet, who set rhythms, weave passes, and waltz past opponents. But there are other footballers, who are masters of space—with what is not there—and who are more than equally effective. Mandžukić is one of those. You don’t tend to hear his name much in commentary, until it’s “Mandžukić!” And he’s there, six yards out, hammering the ball toward the goal, normally with a single touch. In April, I watched Mandžukić snaffle two first-half goals, both instinctive headers, in a 3–1 victory for Juventus over Real Madrid in the Champions League. He was the man of the match, and you weren’t even sure he was there.

I watched the semifinal—curled on the floor and wracked with hope—and I swear that Mandžukić didn’t touch the ball until the eighty-third minute. England had led for a little more than an hour, after Kieran Trippier slippered a free kick into the top corner. But, in the second half, Croatia took a grip on the game. Luka Modrić, of Real Madrid, and Ivan Rakitić, of Barcelona—pros to England’s ams—started snapping the ball around. Ivan Perišić, the Internazionale winger, scored a deft equalizer, and then, with no warning, Mandžukić was taking the ball on his chest and thumping it toward Jordan Pickford’s near post.

Mandžukić’s nine-minute, operatic breakdown—a syncopated series of stops, starts, and seizures, which defined the match, and took it away from England—began in the final moments of the first period of extra time. Perišić, who was a menace all night, whipped in a fast low cross from the left and “Mandžukić!” materialized four yards out and made contact. But he and the ball collided with Pickford, who lept out and made a brilliant save. After the collision, the Croatian lay on the ground for some time. When Mandžukić limped off to prepare for the final fifteen minutes of the game, he pulled his shorts halfway down his thighs, as if he might be done for the night.

And then he was down on the grass. Cramp. Sorry! Mandžukić sat on the edge of England’s penalty area. He made the international gesture for “Not my fault.” John Stones, Kyle Walker, and Harry Maguire, England’s back three, stood over him, alternately offering a hand. No good. Cramp, guys. Eventually, Mandžukić got to his feet, somehow. He trotted around for a few minutes. He definitely seemed hurt. He went down again. The same rigmarole. Maybe Mandžukić was in real trouble. Maybe the England defenders, against their better judgment, thought that he was no longer a threat. Because, in the eighteenth minute of extra time, Walker took an ungainly, tired swing at a Croatian cross. The ball popped up. Perišić nodded it vaguely back toward the England goal and, for an instant, Mandžukić had the space that he needed, and had searched for, all night. It wasn’t much. A yard of grass all around. With his left foot, he lashed the ball across Pickford and into the net, and then ran all the way to the Croatia fans and the TV cameras, where everyone got in a tangle and started kissing one another. Time ran out on England after that. Mandžukić went down one final time. With six minutes to go, Zlatko Dalić, the Croatia manager, called him off. The man was done. He limped all the way to the sideline.